I want to be quite circumspect here (at least for my own re-telling of this story) — and not immediately suggest that the $1.9 billion has actually gone astray. [We have all read too many breathless stories that turn out to be baseless, of initially-missing aid (of all sorts) to Africa.]

It seems far more likely that — due to fractured, and hurried aid efforts — record-keeping took a bit of a back seat, and consequently, a portion of the $5 billion pledged last year just hasn’t been reported as delivered, in-country, or spent yet, given that the main focus of a vast multinational effort had been arresting the epidemic, up to now.

It would be indeed deeply disheartening, to think (or later learn) that some governmental or charitable entities had failed to live up to their pledges — so I will refrain from suggesting that. as well.

Even so, there is — according to no less an authority than Oxfam International — apparently about $1.9 billion in promised aid that it cannot establish has arrived, in country, for use against the now largely-abating Ebola scourge.

We will, of course, track this story closely, from here on. From the AP Wire Services, as of yesterday:

. . . .More than $5 billion was pledged by the international community as part of a special International Ebola Recovery Conference in New York last July. At least $1.9 billion of that “still has not been allocated to a specific country in a pledge statement let alone through more firm commitments to specific recovery programs. . . .”